Looking for a change

The Gravity Light Foundation took the challenge to replace the use of the kerosene lamps in the developing world. Today, 20% of the world’s population does not have access to electricity. That’s 1 in 5 people. Without electricity, most of these people have no other option but to use kerosene lamps to light their homes. The aim of this startup then is to eradicate kerosene lamps by developing an extremely low-cost light. The key is to create an innovative device that generates light from gravity. GravityLight is a lamp providing clean, reliable and safe light, enabling people to break free from the economic, health and environmental hazards of kerosene lamps.

SPEOS for a viable product

Since then, The GravityLight Foundation initially uses the SPEOS technologies - an optical simulation software based on the physics laws of light and human vision - as a test tool via the SatLight’s study. A way for the charity team to try the every possibility of their product, by modeling its light.

“We worked through the tools to get an impression of light output from the geometry” states Rob Butterworth , Design Engineer. “SPEOS gave us the opportunity to show the existing design was performing well to achieve what we wanted. The idea was to increase the light intensity over a smaller area like a spotlight”.

SPEOS was not only used as a decision-maker, but it eased the members of the charity about the viability of their prototype design.

“ It has helped us in our development cycle for this round as it gave us confidence that the design we were tooling would deliver has we had planned”.

“Improving people’s life thanks to light and innovation”

In the future, the British Foundation intends to develop a new GravityLight generation. This project will be the occasion to challenge potential problems light-related thanks to the use SPEOS.

“It will be a very useful tool going forward and developing the GravityLight, when we have to define lens geometries in future versions and products. It will let us simulate the light distribution we can expect from any given lens design before we commit to high cost and long lead-time tooling, and give numbers on the actual illuminance expected”.

“We are very pleased to contribute to the development of thos ingenious lighting systems. The OPTIS software are mostly based on optical and physics law, and GravityLight is an interesting compromise between those two. Accompany the Foundation in its project holds us near and dear because it permits to improve people’s life thanks to light and innovation, and those are important guidelines for the OPTIS’ activity”.

The cooperation of two complementary ideas, connecting physics, lighting, and technology to bring light where it is lacking.